He would spend hours and hours alone in it, reading or simply smoking his pipe and staring out at the mountains. Mama told me that her grandfather had often used the room as a personal retreat. The turret room was a fairly good size round room with two windows that faced the front. It was large and unique in this area of upstate New York, an eclectic Queen Anne with a steeply hipped roof, two lower cross gables, and a turret at the west corner of the front facade. She believed it was as sacred as a church.Īnyone looking at the house might readily accept that it held some special powers.

The house would always protect them, protect us. Through the hot, undulating air that lay between us, the house seemed to shimmer and swell up around her and Baby Celeste as if it were determined to block them from the view passengers in cars along the highway would have. Mama took another step toward me and away from the house to call again. I was already quite tan, the farmer's tan, Daddy used to call it, because my arms were dark up to the edges of my sleeves and my neck down to my collar. A wisp of a breeze teased me with a promise of some relief that had yet to be fulfilled. Worms, lubricated and shiny from the night's rain, slipped through my muddied fingers. The redolent aroma of rich, wet soil filled my nostrils. I was on my hands and knees pruning weeds in the herb garden. Today was one of those summer days in July when clouds seemed hinged to the horizon, not a single sliver of one interfering with the orange disk of sun sliding gracefully over the icy blue toward the mountains in the west.

This secrecy had existed from the moment Baby Celeste had been born, a little more than two and a half years ago. Mama never brought her out during the daytime for fear someone, even from the distance in a passing car, might see her and learn that she existed.

She was standing there with Baby Celeste beside her, which was quite unusual. She had a radish-red bandanna tied across her forehead, which she said would ward off recent curses whenever they were thrown in her direction, so I knew something had spooked her today. Her hazel brown, shoulder-length hair fell straight alongside her cheeks. I turned to see her waving at me from the front steps of the porch. 'Noble,' Mama called with urgency resonating in her voice.

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